Documentation

Development

Description

INN (InterNetNews) is a very full-featured and flexible news server
package, originally written by Rich Salz in 1991 as a higher performance
alternative to C News. It was then maintained for some time by Dave Barr,
then by James Brister, and then by Katsuhiro Kondou and I. I've since had
to cut back significantly on the work I do on INN due to lack of time, but
other people (particularly Julien ÉLIE) have picked up the slack I left.

INN doesn't try to be the fastest possible news server, or the simplest,
and it's definitely not the easiest to configure. It does try to be one
of the most flexible, as well as acceptably fast for even large sites, and
over the years it's been used by many people as a platform for
experimentation with new news protocol ideas.

Requirements

INN is written in ANSI C, so it requires a C compiler and a modern
operating system that supports ANSI C. gcc will work fine. It also
requires Perl, at least version 5.004_03, since many supporting utilities
and parts of the build system are written in Perl. To build INN, you also
need a reasonably decent make program that supports include; GNU make will
do quite well.

For support for authenticated control messages, you need either PGP
or GnuPG, the latter being recommended. For embedded filtering and
authentication hook support, you need either Perl 5.004_03 or later
(5.8 or later recommended) or Python 1.5.2 or later (2.5 or later
recommended), depending on what language you want to write your filters
and authentication hooks in.

For the ovdb overview storage method, you'll need Berkeley DB 4.4 or later
(4.7 or later recommended). If you have zlib available, you can also
compress overview before it's stored into ovdb. For support for news
reading over SSL, you'll need OpenSSL. To support SASL authentication to
nnrpd or to feed newsgroups to an IMAP server with SASL authentication,
you'll need the Cyrus SASL libraries. INN can also check passwords
against a Kerberos KDC; for this, you will need Kerberos libraries.

INN is packaged for Debian as inn2, inn2-lfs (in wheezy and newer),
inn2-dev, and inn2-inews (which contains only the inews client and is used
for news clients that want to use the INN inews to post news). You should
install inn2-lfs if you're using wheezy or earlier and are on a 32-bit
platform and haven't installed INN before. inn2 on those platforms is
only for backward compatibility. Note that the inn package in Debian is a
packaging of INN 1.7.

INN is maintained using the Subversion version control system. To check
out the current development tree, clone one of:

This code is derived from software contributed to the Internet Software
Consortium by Rich Salz.

Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any
purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above
copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND ISC DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH
REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL ISC BE LIABLE FOR ANY
SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES
WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN
ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF
OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.

Some portions of INN are distributed under other licenses. See the file
LICENSE in the distribution for all of the
details.